Once again, we’ve posted an article on the ARM Connected Community info forum. This time, we explored the Total Cost of Ownership for a single board solution vs. a System on Module (SOM) solution. Our analysis turned out to be pretty interesting. If you just look at the recurring costs of both approaches, the single board will be lot cheaper. But when you factor in the engineering costs, things look different, and a SOM becomes the way to go for many industrial and medical applications (those with large, but not astronimcal, consumer-market level volumes). There are other benefits as well, including time to market and the fact that using a SOM will let your engineering staff focus on what’s unique about your product, without having to worry about reinventing the wheel. That’s our job, and with our SOMs, we’ve done it!
Anyway, as we mentioned with respect to our prior article, there’s nothing particularly ARM-related about it, so don’t be turned away if you’re not doing any ARM development. The article can be found here.